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Weekly bits of interest – 25 August 2014

By Alex Roberts - IndustryOn August 25, 20144 Comments

Some recent developments and articles of interest:

What’s the key to creating a successful innovation team? Ruth Puttick shares findings from Nesta. “Setting up a team to ‘do innovation’ is setting them up to fail. Innovation in government should never be the responsibility for one team. An i-team provides the insights, methods, guidance, capacity and support, but delivery will ultimately need to be the responsibility for the rest of government if they are to be embedded into the day-to day.”

Bloomberg Philanthropies is providing $45m in Innovation Delivery grants to US cities. “The foundation will direct significant funding and other assistance to help dozens of cities adopt the Innovation Delivery model, an approach to generating and implementing new ideas that has been tested and refined over the past three years in partnership with city leaders in Atlanta, Chicago, Louisville, Memphis, and New Orleans”

4 comments

I thought fellow readers of the weekly bits of interests might be interested in a draft discussion paper we’ve just written titled Grounded Change. It looks at innovation practice in social services and finds that it’s time to stop reinventing the very idea of innovation. Instead, it argues, it’s time to reinvent when and how to use innovations in policy implementation and service delivery to deliver better outcomes.

I’ve added a link to the document in the website field. But please let me know if you’ve got any questions or would like to discuss it.

Hi Dan – thanks for pointing this out, it’s an interesting paper and we’ll include it in our newsletter.
I like the approach. I think there’s more that needs to be done about understanding the different types or problems and contexts, and the corresponding best forms of innovation. I also think the level of the intervention affects these questions – while everything is local, policy innovation at the macro level is still an important question. I’d be keen to discuss more if you were interested sometime.
Cheers

Dan MohrAugust 26, 2014 at 9:00 pm

Hi Alex
Thank you for including the paper in the newsletter, and for your thoughts. It’s certainly just a start to explore context and different forms of innovation from the macro planning and design to the local implementation level.
It’d be great to discuss more at a time that’s good for you, perhaps in the next couple of weeks. You can reach me at dan@inwithforward.com .
Cheers
Dan